Ways To Avoid High Ethereum Gas Fees

Dr Vin Menon
3 min readFeb 20, 2023

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The Ethereum blockchain has become infamous for charging a very high gas fee per transaction. The gas fees is usually paid in the form of gwei which is equivalent to 0.000000001 ETH. The more the congestion on the Ethereum blockchain, the more gas fees are charged per transaction.

Now, what if you cannot afford the Ethereum gas fees? Is there any way around paying the charges? Well, if you are following the Ethereum blockchain and relevant developments closely enough, there are some ways that can be used to avoid paying high Ethereum gas fees. Let’s try to understand some ways that you can lower the Ethereum gas fees you have to pay.

DeFi Saver Apps

When it comes to paying gas fees, users are not generally aware of how much they will need to pay for all the activities that they perform over the Ethereum blockchain. Sometimes, the lack of knowledge causes them to pay a lot more gas fees than necessary. Use of decentralized finance apps is a way to save as much on gas fees as the users can. This method cannot help in completely avoiding the gas fees but is a great way for saving as much as the users can.

The users have to use the DeFi saver apps for simulating actual Ethereum blockchain activities and therefore estimate how much gas has to be paid. Relying on this data, the users can then reduce the number of activities which seem to be non-urgent. After cutting down on the activities, you can finally run the urgent ones on the ETH network and pay less gas fees.

Transaction Timings

Source / Gas fee to be paid on decentralized ETH network

As the ETH network gets more congested, users have to pay more gas fees as an incentive for the miners to validate the activities or transactions. This is why it is important that you time your transactions properly to pay lesser gas fees and get them uploaded on the blocks quickly. Keep in mind, however, that it is not the most ideal method to reduce the gas fees as it may hamper the productivity of the user.

Layer 2 Blockchains

Have you heard of layer 2 blockchains? These are solutions built upon primary blockchains to help out with increasing scalability and lessening the load on the main chain. So if you wish to pay lower gas fees and get your transactions validated faster, you can use layer 2 blockchains like Polygon for your activities. Arbitum and Optimism are also other layer 2 solutions built to scale Ethereum that you can consider for your transactions, and pay lower Ethereum gas fees.

dApps Offering Rebates

There are some dApps that offer discounts and rebates to the users for using their platform to get the transactions validated on ETH blockchain. These apps offer subsidies either in the form of their native tokens or some other method that seems suitable for both the users and the apps. Balancer is one such dApp that provides a percentage of the Ethereum gas fees back to the users in form of BAL tokens. What’s more, this platform minimizes the gas fees for high frequency traders.

Some dApps also combine multiple transactions and activities from the same user and pose them as a single transaction to get the gas fees lowered.

Conclusion

We do hope this post gives you a good idea of how to avoid high gas fees while using the Ethereum blockchain. The Ethereum Average Gas Price charts from ycharts is a web page that keeps a track on the Ethereum gas prices on a regular basis. Looking at this chart, you can have an idea of the kind of fees you have to pay as Ethereum gas fees.

Paying gas fees for every transaction over the network can be unaffordable at times the fees is very high due to congestion. Post the Ethereum Merge, many are hoping the developers will gradually find a way to lower the gas fees on the network while increasing scalability. However, for now, these seem to be the most popular methods for you to avoid high Ethereum gas fees as a user.

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Dr Vin Menon
Dr Vin Menon

Written by Dr Vin Menon

A blockchain enthusiast and entrepreneur’s musings on the next big revolution since the Internet.